Schools & tutoring
Half eight: the one person who may answer is counted in a room.
It gets it on the screen before ten.
It answers on the first ring, gets the absence to the right room while the register is still open, and takes the days, the age and the month a new family needs — while giving out nothing whatsoever about a child.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“Hiya, it's Leanne, Ollie's mum — he's been sick in the night, he's not in today.”
Takes the child's name, his room and the reason in her own words, reads it back, and puts it in front of the manager while the register is still open — so nobody spends the morning ringing emergency contacts about a child who is asleep at his nan's.
Half eight: the one person who may answer is counted in a room.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“Ollie's not in, he's been sick”
It reaches for
take_message
Logs it to his room, in her wording, with the time she rang. It doesn't rule on when he's allowed back.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: key person, in ratio, funded hours, the entitlement, show-round, settling-in. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Hollybank Day Nursery — this is the answering assistant. The manager's in a room at the minute. What can I do for you?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
Place enquiry
- The child
- Days she needs
- Room she'd land inyour documents added
- Show-roundPro · Google Calendar connected
Two days, a room, a Thursday morning to come and look — and nothing promised about a place or a price.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:33) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not rule on whether a child is well enough to come back in
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“He's been right as rain since six, he's had a full bowl of Weetabix. Can I just bring him in?”
Agent
That isn't mine to call. It's your setting's sickness policy and the manager's judgement, and I'd be deciding it over the phone about a child I can't see. Let me get her the question now.
The question reaches a person whether or not she asks for one: she rang a nursery, not a triage line, and she has no reason to know she needs the manager until she has been told no. One medical sentence does survive the rule — if what she is describing sounds like it needs a doctor this morning rather than a nursery place, it says so and points her at 111, or 999 if she is frightened. That is the only health line in the prompt, and it is there because a parent at half six in the morning rings the nursery first.
The relay
Your designated safeguarding lead, or the manager if you haven't named one knows in 9 seconds
Two calls stop being business the moment they start: anything about where a named child is or how they are, and anything a caller begins to disclose about a child's safety. The agent stops, asks nothing further, offers nothing. The alert goes out first and does not wait for the transfer to connect, because a transfer can fail and a disclosure cannot wait for a second attempt.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Absences on the manager's screen before ten
The absence is logged to the room the child is actually in, with the time she rang, instead of sitting in a voicemail box until lunchtime while somebody starts ringing emergency contacts.
Never put a call through to anyone who's in ratio
The call becomes a message the manager reads when she is off the floor, instead of a practitioner stepping out of the baby room to take it and leaving the room one adult short while she does.
Take waiting-list names for dates I can't offer yet
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Tells your team, during the call
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Puts the caller through to a person
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Holds someone for a cancellation
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
- Moves a booking
- Finds an existing booking to change
- Puts the job in the calendar
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About one call in three, and more than half of the ones at half eight
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, and the arithmetic behind it is not the usual one. A nursery office is nominally staffed all day; the trouble is that the person in it is the manager, she is counted in the ratio, and the two windows the phone rings hardest — 07:30 to 09:00 and 16:00 to 18:00 — are the two windows she is on the floor covering a room, on a show-round, or in early because somebody rang in sick at 06:40. Across a whole day we would put it at a fifth to a third; inside those two windows it goes above half, which is where it hurts, because that is when both the absences and the new families ring. We looked for a published figure for early years and there is no credible one — the percentages in circulation are published by firms selling answering services into nurseries. Count a Monday against your own handset instead — that number is worth more than ours.
About £150 for each call you get back
Our figure, not a study. Our arithmetic, and it is a nursery's rather than an average of four trades. A part-time place grosses a setting somewhere near £150 a week once funded income is counted, and we take 45 weeks of it — £6,750 — then stop at one year, although a child who starts in the baby room is usually still with you at three. We assume one place enquiry in five becomes a registration, which is a soft number with one small case behind it and no survey anywhere; halve it if the show-round is the manager's first go at selling. That puts an answered place enquiry at about £1,350. Then the honest division: roughly one call in nine is a new place, and the other eight are an absence, a fee query, a grandmother, a mother changing her days — worth keeping, worth nothing on this line. £1,350 across nine calls is the £150 above. We have priced it in pounds because a British week is the one we could actually check, and we are not going to hand you a dollar figure that is only today's exchange rate; run the same three lines on your own weekly rate. Nor are we multiplying it by your call volume to print a year. Every brochure in this category leads with that total, and not one of them has seen your Monday.
- A nursery place is priced by the week, which is why one recovered enquiry is worth a year of them.
- Coram Family and Childcare, Childcare Survey 2026, 2026-03-18. Annual survey of childcare prices reported by local authorities across England, Scotland and Wales: a 25-hour place at £133.08 a week in Scotland, £166.33 in Wales, and £189 a week for families in England not eligible for the entitlement. Coram campaigns on childcare affordability, so what it collects is the price parents pay, not the money a setting banks — the two differ by the shortfall on every funded hour, which is the reason nobody in this trade says 'free'.
Questions
What schools & tutoring owners ask first
I'm not having a machine talk to my parents about their children. If a mum rings because something's happened to her little boy and she gets a robot, I'm finished.
She is right, and that call is not the one it takes. It never handles a disclosure, never discusses a named child, never gives out one fact about who is on site; the moment a call turns towards a child's welfare it stops and fetches a person, and if that person is in a room it takes the number and marks it urgent rather than trying to help. What it takes is the other four calls in five — Ollie's not in today, how much is it and have you got September, can my mum get her tonight, what's the wait for babies. And the comparison isn't the agent against her. It's the agent against what a parent actually gets at 07:40 on a Monday, while she's covering the baby room because someone rang in sick at 06:40 and she can't leave without breaking ratio: nine rings and a recording. A mother who rang three nurseries and got voicemail at two of them doesn't think the third one is warmer. She thinks it's open.
Will it tell a parent whether their child is in today?
No, and there is no version of the setup where it will. It takes information in about a child and gives none out — not whether they're on roll, not whether they were here, not who collected them, not to someone who sounds exactly like the mother. An inbound call cannot verify who is speaking, and settings routinely hold do-not-disclose flags where a parent has no parental responsibility or an order is in force. The same rule covers the regulated facts about you: it will not state an inspection grade, a staff-to-child ratio, a qualification level or anyone's DBS status.
A parent rings in an absence at ten to eight. What actually happens to it?
It takes the child's name, the room, the reason and the time she rang, reads it back to her, and saves it as a message your team is notified about straight away — so the register is right by ten and nobody spends the morning ringing emergency contacts about a child who is asleep at his nan's. It also takes the second half of that call, the one that is really a diary change: she's back Thursday, nan's collecting Friday, she'll drop the fees cheque in. What it does not do is answer the question she asks next, about when he's allowed back; that one is further down this page, and it is the whole reason the rule is flat.
Every other call is about the funded hours. What does it actually say?
It says 'funded', never 'free' — and then it says less than a parent wants. It will read your session times and your rates off your own sheet, because those are yours and published. It will not tell her whether she qualifies, what a code does to her invoice, or what she'd pay: eligibility runs through an HMRC code the parent obtains and reconfirms every three months, the entitlement rarely covers the real cost of a session, and a setting that lets a phone call imply otherwise has bought itself a fee dispute in September. The question goes to the manager with the parent's number and the days she wants, which is the only form in which it can actually be answered.
Will it sign a family up on the phone?
No. It books the show-round, and a human closes. An enrolment agreed on a call is a distance contract carrying a fourteen-day right to cancel under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, so a keen answering service that registers someone at 08:15 has handed you a cancellation and an argument about a deposit. It takes no registration fee and no card details — booking a look round creates nothing anybody has to unwind.
Our enquiries all land in January and February, for September starts.
Which is the case for it rather than against. In those six or seven weeks a setting takes three or four times its usual calls through the same one handset, with the same manager, who is still counted in a room — and the calls arrive in the same two windows as the absences, so they queue behind them. It does not get busy. It answers the thirtieth call of the morning the way it answered the first, takes the age, the days and the month, and leaves them on your desk in one shape instead of eleven voicemails you listen to at nine at night. What it will not do is invent a start date, or tell any of them there's a place.
Start
Put it on your schools & tutoring line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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